Counter-Currents
2,984 words
Dominic Frisby
Life After the State: Why We Don’t Need Government
Unbound, 2013
Dominic Frisby
Bitcoin: The Future Of Money?
Unbound, 2014
Within traditional, mainstream politics the assumption is that free trade is the preferred tool of the Right, and the state the preferred tool of the Left. One of the distinguishing features of the New Right is that it refuses to be beholden to money values and so it distances itself from the capitalist rhetoric of the conservative right. In recent weeks this New Right perspective has appeared in Patrick Le Brun’s “A Tale of Two Victims” and in Vincent Law’s “The Dogma of Free Trade.” In both articles it is evident that the authors deplore the increasing gap between rich and poor and the attendant downgrading of the working and middle classes.
Patrick Le Brun’s article is particularly heartbreaking, detailing the sad case of Maria Fernandes who was working four part time jobs to make ends meet. Due to the unsociable hours that this required, she was forced to sleep in her car between shifts. She died of toxic fumes from a gas can kept in her car. Although three of her four jobs were with the same employer they were worked at different franchised outlets so she wasn’t entitled to the same benefits as a full time employee. She was also in receipt of state benefits despite working long hours. We are right to deplore the inhumanity that causes such misery, but it is striking that the solution proposed by the New Right is often so similar to that of the Old Left: a minimum wage, a cap on earnings, limits to free trade. And, because the New Right wishes to implement these sorts of policies it has been important for us to focus on how to gain control of state power. Certainly, the desired outcome of these sort of state interventions is entirely noble but are they effective? Dominic Frisby would answer, “no.”
In Life After the State, Frisby compellingly describes why the state is too big and why it causes harm even when it has benevolent intentions. Before moving on to the reasons for the state’s failures it is worth mentioning some of the evidence that Frisby presents to show why the state is failing. In particular, his chapters on health and education are especially impressive. Regarding health, in the UK there was the extraordinary waste of the Labour government’s IT project. £12 billion (US $20) was spent before the entire project was scrapped with nothing to show for it. As Frisby points out, if our taxes hadn’t been taken and wasted so profligately, many of us would have been able to afford private health care. He also mentions the poor standard of care received by many patients in the NHS, in particular citing the case of Kane Gorny who was refused drinking water until he died of thirst. According to a 2009 Healthcare Commission report, up to 1,200 people died due to poor care in Stafford hospital between 2005 and 2008. Frisby also mentions the serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman who was still on the General Medical Council’s register of doctors when he was sentenced to 15 life sentences for killing over 250 people. Such complacency comes easy to such bloated organisations, and Frisby shows persuasively that the NHS is run for the benefit of doctors rather than patients.
The situation in the US is no better. “Do Americans get value for money?” Frisby asks. “Though paying twice as much (as a percentage of GDP when compared to the global average), the US has a higher infant mortality rate than most industrialized nations and lies in 42nd place in the life expectancy leagues, behind the other G5 nations – Japan, France, Germany and the UK – as well as, notably, Cuba, in 37th.” (2174)
As for education, Frisby cites a study showing that 22% of 16-19 year olds at state schools are functionally innumerate, whilst 17% are functionally illiterate. In contrast, by 1880 over 95% of fifteen year olds were literate. Considering that the average cost of teaching a child at a state school is currently £10,000 per year and the average private school fees are £10,200 per year it would seem that we are being severely short-changed by the state. Frisby’s preferred option for education is home schooling, but his point is that parents should be responsible for their children’s education and that they should have a genuine choice about it. At the moment, as is the case with healthcare, only the rich can afford the superior private option whilst the rest are left with the dysfunctional state option as a default.
Many people will think that removing state provision of health and education would be a complete disaster because the poorest members of society would lose out. But this is precisely the situation now with the continuing expansion of those sectors. Frisby’s innovative insight is that state provision of services actually worsens conditions for the poorest people rather than bettering them. He provides a fascinating account of how people used to organize their own healthcare through locally run Friendly Societies. By 1910 in the UK three quarters of the manual workforce were members of these societies. They would employ doctors to treat their members and provide sick pay. With the introduction of National Insurance in 1911 the workers were forced to pay the state for health care and often could not afford to continue paying for membership of the Friendly Society on top of that. In addition, doctors were able to demand higher wages from the state and they began to be priced out of the reach of the Societies. Thus the process began of moving from many efficient suppliers of healthcare to one, compulsory, inefficient supplier.
The question of choice, and the state’s role in eliminating it, is central to one of this book’s most important themes: the supply of money. Frisby is careful to differentiate the sort of capitalism he supports from that which is most commonly practiced. Under Thatcher and Reagan, so the folk wisdom goes, we had unrestrained market forces and unalloyed capitalism. But Frisby doesn’t recognize this as genuine capitalism at all, partly because the state increased in size through the 1980s and partly because the state controlled and monopolized the supply of money. It is the very nature of the money supply system as currently practiced that is the most corrosive force in society. It systemically transfers wealth from the bottom to the top. Governments issue money and then banks issue money (as debt) based on those reserves. In fact, “97% of money in the UK and in the US is created digitally by banks, and most of this money is created when people go into debt to them.” (1237) So, whilst banks issue money, the state has a monopoly on the currency used; you cannot opt out of the system, and this is why it is so exploitative. Furthermore, when governments measure inflation they exclude 90% of money from their calculations. This 90% includes money put into property and financial markets. Your wages will belong to the 10% of money that does go in to the inflation calculation. This money (measured by the Consumer Price Index) averages at 2.8% growth per year. But the amount of money in total in the UK has been increasing by 11.5% per year. This means that the value of property and financial assets increases much faster than wages; your money is being systematically devalued.
Frisby illustrates this process by way of an allegory that is so elegant it deserves quoting in full.
Imagine a tiny economy. There are 20 people in it. Of these, ten each have $1 in cash, so there is $10 in the entire economy. The other ten people each have an asset – these are the only assets in the economy and are each priced at $1. People quite happily buy and sell these assets for $1 each. If more assets appear in this economy, but the amount of money stays finite, the cost of assets will fall. But let us assume for now no new assets enter the economy.
One person – Mr. King – is suddenly able to magically create another $10 from nowhere. He decides to go out and spend some of this new money. He buys an asset for $1, which the vendor is happy to sell because, based on the knowledge the vendor has, that is the fair market price. Except that it isn’t because there is no longer $10 in the economy, but $20. At $1 the vendor has sold his asset too cheap – and he has received devalued money in exchange.
Mr. King then decides to outbid the others and offers $1.50 for another asset. This vendor is delighted, sells, probably feeling rather clever, and makes off with $1.50, but even he has sold his asset too cheap. Mr King, meanwhile, is becoming asset rich. The other vendors hear assets are now trading for $1.50 and now expect that price, which Mr King is happy to pay. In other words, asset prices are gradually rising to reflect the new money in circulation.
There are some big losers in this process – the people who each had $1. The purchasing power of their money is now no longer enough to buy an asset they were previously able to buy. Ultimately, their purchasing power will halve because there is twice as much money in circulation. They haven’t acted imprudently in any way – they haven’t even acted – yet they are made poorer by this process of other people creating new money.
What about the people holding the assets? How have they done? Eventually, asset prices in this economy will rise to $2 – there are ten assets and $20 in circulation. The price of their assets should rise to reflect this extra money in circulation, so – as long as they didn’t sell – they come out even. They might think they are richer because their asset now costs $2, but this is a delusion: it is the same asset. They have just survived the inflation, nothing more. If, however, they were one of the early vendors who sold for $1 or $1.50, now they cannot afford to buy back the asset they previously sold. They are ‘priced out’ and poorer.
Meanwhile, Mr. King has done extremely well. He benefits, of course, as the recipient of a load of newly created money. But he was also able to buy assets for $1 and $1.50, before they rose in price to reflect the new money in circulation, so, with his assets now valued at $2, he profits from the asset-price inflation too. Wealth, which was originally spread evenly through our tiny economy, has insidiously transferred from cash-holders and those who sold their assets early to Mr. King.
As a consequence of this process not only has wealth transferred, but those operating in our tiny economy no longer focus on making things. Instead they look for signs of future money creation and speculate on those signs, because there is more money to be made that way.
There we have the dynamic of Western economies over the last 40 years. (1308-1330)
In summary, debt finance devalues the money that ordinary people earn whilst, at the same time, the ever-expanding state robs us through taxation. This all results in increasing inequality, contra the state’s claim to enforce equality. As long as governments have a monopoly on the currency this situation will continue. Which brings us neatly on to Frisby’s recently published Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
I first became aware of Dominic Frisby when searching on Amazon for an introduction to Bitcoin. Frisby’s book was rated very highly and looked more interesting than the other offerings. I was dimly aware that Bitcoin was potentially an important innovation, but I wanted to understand it from a socio-political perspective as well as from a techno-economic one. Frisby’s book delivers on all counts.
Frisby begins by offering a lucid explanation of what Bitcoin is and how it works. I shan’t attempt to summarize it here; buy the book and read it for yourself. He also gives a fascinating account of the cypherpunk milieu from which Bitcoin emerged. All of this was totally new to me, and it’s fascinating stuff. Perhaps the most important innovation to come from these anarchistic coders was the notion of publicly verifying a transaction that a computer has been involved in. The transaction is completed when a computer solves a complex mathematical puzzle. The completed transaction is then sent to the network and is verified when the network agrees that it has been solved correctly. This system was the basis for Bitcoin’s block chain. The beauty of this system is that it requires no central authority to maintain the integrity of the exchanges that take place within it. It is a distributed, decentralized system that self-regulates. Because it does not rely on trust in a government or central bank it is known as a trustless system. Frisby’s chapter on this “anarchic computing subculture” is an extraordinary example of how power structures can be challenged with little more than determination and a very good idea.
There is also a chapter on Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. I had assumed that this character was the elderly Japanese gentleman (Dorian Nakamoto) who appeared in news reports around the world when he was “outed.” Frisby thinks not, and he makes a compelling case that Nakamoto is actually one Nick Szabo, a cypherpunk and polymath of some genius. As all of this is new to me I can’t really comment on the plausibility of Frisby’s assertion beyond noting that many other people who know far more than me seem to agree with him. In any case, Szabo is an interesting enough fellow in his own right. His paper on the origins of money is worth checking out, as is his website.
Another interesting development that takes Bitcoin’s technology one step further is Ethereum. Ethereum is built on the block chain foundation, but it is specifically designed to be open-ended in its application. It can operate as a digital currency, like Bitcoin, but it can also be used for social networks, email, financial markets, or anything else. Effectively, it seems to be offering a new form of internet built on a distributed network, rather than central servers. This has important implications for anonymity on the web as well as for the resilience of web-based services. The absence of central servers would make it almost impossible for governments to monitor or remove content from the web. Email communications would take place between the sender and the receiver(s) with no intermediary party. This makes such communication secure as it cannot be intercepted in transit. Thus Ethereum, building on the block chain technology of Bitcoin, offers the possibility of anonymous and secure web usage. Some people think that Ethereum (or something like it) will herald a new type of World Wide Web, already being referred to as Web 3.0. No wonder governments aren’t crazy about these innovations. In this context, Frisby is right to say, “The revolution will not be televised. It will be time-stamped on the block chain.” (2668)
One of the implications of Bitcoin is in the free movement of capital around the globe. Frisby comments, “The implications of this possibility to instantly transfer wealth or ownership across borders without interference are, I think, considerable. It means borders would lose much of their significance.” (2187) This statement probably goes to the heart of the problem many people will have with Frisby’s brand of anarcho-capitalism. It brings to mind a world in which people move freely, without any concern for national identities, but at the behest of the investment projects of multinational corporations. It sounds like our world but worse.
But is this a fair interpretation? I think not, for two principle reasons. Firstly, mass immigration is hugely incentivized by the welfare provisions (including healthcare) that all Western countries offer. If the state was dramatically reduced in scope then those countries would immediately be less appealing than they are now. Unless there was a surplus of jobs then immigrants would often be worse off moving to a new country than staying put. Secondly, if Bitcoin (or some other cryptocurrency) lives up to its potential and rings the death knell for debt based finance then this is likely to minimize the opportunity for rapacious, exploitative movements of capital. There would have to be a global rebalancing of the books as the opportunity to make vast amounts of money very quickly through speculation would diminish. In a strange irony, complete free market capitalism would be more stable and settled. Given a genuinely free choice most people will choose home.
Of course, many people will disagree with my interpretation, but it is undoubtedly the case that history is moving in the direction that Frisby foresees. I see this as an opportunity rather than a threat. More freedom can only be a good thing. The danger for us is that if we remain too enamored of options that rely on heavy state intervention, such as a minimum wage, or high taxation, we will be offering 20th-century solutions to 21st-century problems.
Frisby covers a great deal more than I have touched on in this review and it is all food for thought. Although he favors a complete dismantling of the state he is aware that this is unlikely to happen in toto any time soon, and he offers a number of imaginative suggestions based on a vast reduction in state power. It is not necessary to be a capitalist or an anarchist to recognize that Frisby’s voice is an interesting and radical one.
Both books are well worth reading but if you only want to try one then go for Bitcoin: The Future of Money? As well as providing a lucid and extensive introduction to the subject it also contains a chapter summarizing much of the material contained in the earlier book. Both are also available as ebooks at a very reasonable price.
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7 comments
In the past, I have read and appreciated other writings of Mr. Christopher Pankhurst. In this most recent article, I am glad that, as a libertarian, he is still willing to engage with the New Right, which has historically been hostile to his economic views. Years ago, I found myself in a very similar mindset to that of Mr. Pankhurst. However, I would now like to make some elementary arguments which should hopefully provoke other readers to take on a deeper and more critical investigation of libertarianism.
“£12 billion (US $20) was spent before the entire project was scrapped with nothing to show for it. As Frisby points out, if our taxes hadn’t been taken and wasted so profligately, many of us would have been able to afford private health care.”
The $20 billion was not taken evenly from the population. The rich contributed more, and the poor contributed less. Yes; the execution was horrible. But even if you gave all of that $20 billion back, there would still be White Britons unable to afford health care. I am sometimes surprised at the suggestion that we should work towards deconstructing the state as a method of preventing non-Whites from getting their hands on our wealth. This is only a short term solution to a long term problem, which could more straightforwardly be solved by segregation and repatriation.
When Frisby mentions the “higher infant mortality rate [of America as compared to] most industrialized nations” and that America “lies in 42nd place in the life expectancy leagues, behind the other G5 nations – Japan, France, Germany and the UK – as well as, notably, Cuba, in 37th,” he ignores race and culture.
Cuba is 64.1% White, 26.6% Mestizo, and 9.3% Black.
By comparison, the USA is roughly 62.6% White, 18.9% Mestizo/Other, 13.2% Black, and 5.3% Asian.
Cuba is a slightly (nominally) Whiter country than the USA. It is also less (nominally) African. This should help explain how Cuba could be ahead of the USA. Economic doctrine can manipulate a nation’s prosperity, but it cannot change the racial source. East German communism and the Israeli kibbutz system will stand forever over Russian or Ethiopian communism, not because of differing economic doctrine, but because of inherent racial cultural differences.
We must also note that the diet of Americans is poor and includes much more fast food, which leads to a lower life expectancy, and has nothing to do with economics. In fact, whereas the free market seems to have no solution to self destructive obesity trends, the state has a multitude of swift and merciless weapons against mass gluttony, including youth athleticism programs, taxes on sugar, and banning addictive additives in food.
Finally we must state that different races have different races have different metabolisms, which lead to different life spans. This is not something which can be manipulated by economic doctrine.
It is curious that any libertarian would mention that Japan, France, Germany, the UK, and especially Cuba are doing better than the USA, because they are all less free market than the USA, owing to their more homogenous natures (even in Cuba there is a more homogenous, mono-lingual culture.)
“Frisby cites a study showing that 22% of 16-19 year olds at state schools are functionally innumerate, whilst 17% are functionally illiterate. In contrast, by 1880 over 95% of fifteen year olds were literate.”
Again, Frisby is colorblind when it comes to race. I will not buy Frisby’s books just to look up these unnamed studies. But I can speculate that the 1880 study ignored Native Americans on reservations, and likely even the students of racially segregated Black schools. Therefore it’s possible that the 1880 study was looking at a near 100% White sample of students.
Even if this was not the case, in 1880, White Americans were over 86.5% of the population. And unlike today, nearly 100% of those White Americans were of European origin, whereas today, the “62.6 White Americans” are somewhat more Arabic and Iranian in origin. We could even break things down further and speak of post-1880 influx of Slavic, Greek and Sicilian immigrants, as opposed to the North Western European founding stock of America, and the slight racial-cultural differences which are still statistically significant.
Regardless of this controversial point, today, Whites together with Asians (the two races which tend to be more inclined towards numeracy and literacy) comprise 67.9% of the population. Perhaps this difference of over 18.6% between 1880 and 2013 in the percentage of “Whites/Asians” vs. “Blacks/Mestizos” also accounts for the increase of 17-22% in illiteracy and innumeracy, respectively. My argument is not that 100% of the newcomers are illiterate and innumerate, but that the influx of these newcomers has increased crime, poverty, lack of social capital, family dysfunction, as well as miscegenation in their neighbors, leading to worse educational outcomes. But Frisby would loathe to make such a correlation.
“Considering that the average cost of teaching a child at a state school is currently £10,000 per year and the average private school fees are £10,200 per year it would seem that we are being severely short-changed by the state.” This is the same fallacy that Frisby uses with regard to health care. Progressive taxes are wealth redistribution, which make it possible for poor families to send their children to higher quality schools than what they would otherwise be able to afford.
Since this fallacy has now been perpetuated twice, an example is in order. Say that the average food bill of an average family is $2,400 a year. One day the government decides to tax everyone an average of $2,400, and then offer vouchers of exactly $2,400 to each citizen to pay for food. Here comes the pop question: does the voucher system prevent poor families from going hungry? The answer is yes, since the tax system is presumed to be progressive.
There are more arguments for and against such a hypothetical voucher system than can be listed here, but needless to say, the fact that “the average cost of teaching a child at a state school is currently £10,000 per year and the average private school fees are £10,200 per year” does not necessarily mean “we are being severely short-changed by the state.” It definitely means that rich people are paying more for public services than what they receive in public services, and that poor people are receive more than they are paying for. That’s wealth redistribution and perhaps corruption and inefficiency, but not axiomatic “short changing.” It is possible that one can tolerate the relative corruption and inefficiency of the state if one values the welfare of the poorest members of society more so than the loss of capital due to lack of competition. And corruption and inefficiency can be drastically reduced by the reintroduction of racial and cultural homogeneity, as well as through eugenic programs which can never be enacted in a libertarian state.
Friendly Societies are not the solution to poverty, but factionalize the nation into class alliances. Friendly Societies were the result of working class solidarity, which provided below average health care. They are qualitatively different from a nation wide healthcare program which provides equal care to all citizens, even those who could not afford to pay into Friendly Societies.
I can’t offer much criticism on the bit-coin part. We do currently have a serious federal reserve / stock market problem and I am genuinely hopeful that bit-coin and other crypto-currencies can offer some relief. Perhaps third-position economists and libertarian economists can work together on this point, but it’s not one I’m very knowledgeable about.
My problem with Frisby and most libertarians is that they are offering what are ultimately short term solutions to long term problems. At best, Capitalism is the best method for rich Whites to hoard their wealth in a multi-racial society. But that will always be an uphill battle and can only end in a pathetic apartheid state, where the non-White majority is held at bay by a minority. It is not surprising that the early admirers of individualist anti-statism are the likes of Alisa Rosenbaum, von Mises, Rothbard, Friedman, and Greenspan, whose people are used to being a minority which attempts to hold a majority at bay.
Yes; Hitler lauded the British Imperialists against the Indian, the American Imperialists against the “Redskins,” and the idea of German domination of the Ukraine:
“Let’s learn from the English, who, with two hundred and fifty thousand men in all, including fifty thousand soldiers, govern four hundred million Indians. … What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.”
But this should not and cannot be the vision of White Nationalists. It is unsustainable and has given in to failure time and time again over the past several thousand years. Even Hitler began to recant these views near the end of his life:
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Hitler-think-of-India-and-Indian-people
Just because we live in an illegitimate Weimar state does not mean that all conceivable states are illegitimate, or that a qualitatively different kind of state, with a different ideological and racial-cultural source, cannot serve the people as the most effective tool for national strength. I was once a libertarian and anti-statist, and I think the ideology is useful for proving the impracticality of pacifism, or as libertarians call it, “The Non-Aggression Principle.” I’m glad Mr. Johnson decided to post this piece, despite his own economic views, because only by fully engaging with and understanding the arguments of libertarianism can we refute them and root them out of our new nation. Additionally, legitimately racialist libertarians such as Mr. Pankhurst provide a bridge of understanding between unconverted libertarians and the völkisch movement, for whom I am grateful, since it was such a person which introduced me to the ideas of Counter-Currents. I will look forward to Mr. Pankhurst’s next article.
No
The USA is not libertarian; it is a Crony Capitalist nation & has been for a long time. The New Right should know that state subsidisation of high fructose corn syrup is the cause of obesity. The state subsidises farmers: too much corn. Oh what to do with it? I know, let’s extract the sugar & stick it in beef jerky so Joe Six Pack doesn’t realise he is eating it.
Libertarianism is not incompatible with the nation. Just look at Proudhon or Bakunin; OK, maybe not favourites of the New Right, but I would prefer to live in the stateless but more or less homogenous nations that they imagined instead of the fructo-state of corn & ethanol that is now the USA.
The state has always been a device for redistributing wealth from the wealth creating labourers & artisans to the wealth consuming upper classes, regardless of their race.
You raise some legitimate points, JJ. I agree that America is crony capitalist, but I would argue that unless you are an anti-statist, capitalism leads to crony capitalism. I would also suggest that if you look at rankings of economic freedom, the USA ranks relatively high in terms of lack of corruption and ease of doing business; relative to the world average, it is less crony and more capitalist.
Hopefully my reply to Ralston should show up soon, which deals with anti-statism more in depth; I don’t want to fill up this comments section with too much redundancy. But I agree that Proudhon and Bakunin are worth reading even if they are outside the New Right. (not because they are correct, mind you, but because they take libertarianism to its logical conclusion and therefore expose its unsustainability)
Yes, you are correct to say that state subsidies do contribute to obesity. But they are not the cause of obesity. Lack of physical activity is the cause of obesity. People eat badly today, but malnutrition was also prevalent before sugar and corn subsidies. The only people who were obese before industrialization were those rich enough to avoid manual labor. The difference was in physical activity. I’m not sure how libertarians propose to solve this. In Europe, the government subsidizes fraternal and sororal sport organizations, and many European governments force its citizens to go through military training or else perform civil service. Though some parts of physical activity are cultural and the metabolism is highly influenced by genetic variation between ethnicities.
That said, even if a person is not obese, it’s not healthy to eat certain food additives or poor quality food in general which libertarianism has a hard time banning.
It’s true that the state distributes wealth from laborers to the “wealth consuming upper class,” but so does capitalism. Capitalism rewards capitalists, whether Jewish financier or African singer (behind whom is a Jewish manager.) I’m not arguing that statism is purely meritocratic, but that it has the potential to be more meritocratic than capitalism.
You cannot live in a stateless and homogenous nation. I’ll repost SpawkTalk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0R_GFJlvU
And here’s the script:
spawktalk.blogspot.com/2014/09/re-political-implications-of-race.html
The relevant part is entitled:
Political Implications for Anti-Statists
If you’re following along with the video, the relevant part comes in at 09:00.
I must clarify that I do not have the usual pathology of libertarians i.e. I do not believe that capitalism can exist without the state. Whether you call it Crony Capitalism or just Capitalism, it is made possible by legal structures that were introduced less than three hundred years ago which are in themselves a break in tradition.
Most cultures had developed traditions of dealing with each other that provided equitable outcomes. The rise of a global Bourgeois culture had to steam-roll these traditions in order to triumph.
I subscribe to the left of the libertarian spectrum, surprisingly to many, because it offers the best conditions for the freedom for development of traditions that suit various peoples. Further Europeans are a creative bunch & are stifled by large scale authoritarian systems: the majority of people’s will seek to develop an organic, but dynamic society when given the chance. European creativity will ensure that their vision is the one best suited for global dominance & leadership.
Libertarian societies can protect themselves, because they are hard to infiltrate by foreign powers & threaten would be occupiers with vicious guerrilla campaigns. I know that “Mr Libertarian” is probably not welcome here, but he was on the right path when, in his manifesto, he said that free societies would be those who worked hardest to protect their freedom. Also, I don’t see anyone attacking Somalia; not a free society by any means but a good example of how the lack of a state is an impediment to divide & rule imperialism.
On obesity, there has never been a situation such as now, where food is so manufactured to be deadly. Medicine tells us that obesity is 20% exercise & 80% diet: the problem is that big business has made so much of our diet toxic with high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is not a sugar that can be processed well by the human body when eaten out of context. Normally one would consume it in fruit, along with the fibre. When eaten in foods like beef jerky, baked goods, rice based breakfast cereal, “fruit” juice, alcohol, yoghurt, cookies, “health” bars etc, the liver stores it as fat, whether you are white, native or whatever. It is scandalous that this situation has been allowed.
There is nothing free about the Free Market which politicians give so much credit. It is simply a smoke screen. It is a fake ideology that serves as a replacement for older moral orders. A genuine free market would allow people to live lives that they direct in communities to which the belong. Further, having control over ones productive output allow more time to devote to cultural matters.
The state & capitalism go hand in hand; without the state capitalism would die. Libertarianism offers Europeans the opportunity to create new structures that can protect ethnic traditions where desired & create new ones at the same time.
” I was once a libertarian and anti-statist, and I think the ideology is useful for proving the impracticality of pacifism, or as libertarians call it, “The Non-Aggression Principle.”
If you were once a libertarian, then you should know better than to spout this gross misrepresentation of the NAP, which under no circumstances precludes the use of lethal forrce in legitimate self-defense of kith and kin. Libertarianism also adamantly supports the right to keep and bear arms. It also supports the right to freedom of association or disassociation, something that government goons and bureaucrats, White or otherwise, backed by the armed force of the state, have denied Whites. History has shown that Whites are as vulnerable as other races to the corruptions and temptations that comes with coercive power over humans brings. I am a White Nationalist to the core, but I would prefer to live under in a libertarian White society than a Socialilst state.
‘the NAP under no circumstances precludes the use of lethal force in legitimate self-defense of kith and kin’
On an individual and family level, that is true. But for a race, problems arise.
In my view, the NAP prohibits taxation to an extent. This is also the view of prominent (and intellectually consistent) anti-statist Stefan Molyneux. The only situation in which taxation could be voluntary is if the taxation area (minarchist state or housing community) were small enough that:
a. The community made no unjust land claims, meaning a person could easily move or leave (thus allowing for a legitimate ‘love it or leave it’ argument)
b. The proposed taxes would receive a supermajority consensus in the community/minarchist state
I am aware of theories of polycentric law, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that like minded people will congregate and form de-facto mono-legal towns and communities.
These communities would be extremely vulnerable to an Alexander the Great or a Ghengis Khan, who began with tribes and ended with empires. Or a Roman Empire, which began as a small community of seven hills, and slowly conquered its neighbors. The Book of Joshua is the account of a land of independent and free peoples being eliminated and enslaved. Mohammed began in Medina, but his followers established a Caliphate from Persia to Spain. The nomadic Turks established an empire stretching from Arabia into Austria and Ukraine. In Africa there was the Mali Empire and the Zulu Empire. In pre-Columbian America there were the hated Aztec, Mayan, and Incan Empires. Even in Europe, we had the genocidal Frankish Empire, the patchwork Holy Roman Empire of Germany-Czesky-Burgundy-Italy, the Eurasian Russian Empire, the multicultural Habsburg Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, and today the Empire of Brussels and America. The Swedish Empire was lead by a Christian monarchy, but included Norwegians and Danes, Finns and Sami, all of whom tried in vain to secretly preserve unique pre-Christian cultures. Empires crop up everywhere all the time and will continue to do so. Even though Whites are especially libertarian (and it could even be said that libertarianism is unique to Western culture) they are still under threat of the disease of imperialism.
Even if everyone in the West could be converted to libertarianism, there would always be a foreign threat. The people of Germany were in almost every sense superior to the people of the Soviet Union, yet the principle of quantity beat out the principle of quality. I am not suggesting that socialism solves the problem of empires, but that anti-statism is especially vulnerable.
It doesn’t seem that anti-statism or NAP libertarianism can stand up to this recurring threat, which always leaves new nation states in its wake of collapse. (Think of Alexandrian Egypt and Greco-Bactria, or the country of Mongolia today; the Arab states or the transformation of Gaul into France. Once there were free communities, and afterwards there were nations.)
This is what I was hinting at when I said that the “live and let live” philosophy of the NAP leads to a kind of pacifism. I wasn’t speaking necessarily of individual pacifism in the face of criminals (though Molyneux, for instance, is very keen on pacifistic parenting), but rather pacifism in the face of the looming threat of empire. I won’t go into mutual defense pacts or polycentric defense since there’s plenty of discussion of that on youtube, to which I can’t add anything.
Here’s a video which directly speaks to another part of the problem with anti-statism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0R_GFJlvU
And here’s the script:
spawktalk.blogspot.com/2014/09/re-political-implications-of-race.html
The relevant part is entitled:
Political Implications for Anti-Statists
I say all this because I believe that the core philosophy of libertarianism (natural property rights, NAP, individualism, etc.) can only lead to anti-statism if one is intellectually consistent. But as SpawkTalk argues, anti-statism can’t jive with White Nationalism.
To make an analogous argument: if a person says that all racial differences are due to oppression, they must, to be intellectually consistent, believe that Asians oppress Whites. Despite this fact, many intelligent and well meaning people will believe the former without believing the latter. I’m guessing that you are not an anti-statist, but I’m trying to explain that from my perspective, to support the NAP without being an anti-statist is hypocrisy. But admittedly, anti-statism is pretty esoteric and doesn’t get to the heart of the argument against conventional libertarianism.
Maybe you like the idea of 18th-19th century small government and free markets. I still maintain that these forms of government are inconsistent with the NAP (taxation requires the initiation of force, I’m not trying to misrepresent it) but it’s possible that you think I still don’t understand the NAP. In that case, I’d appreciate a definition of what you define as aggression, if it doesn’t include taxation. Until then, I’m now going to assume you just want a smaller government (i.e. the conventional understanding of the word libertarian.)
I’d like to recommend a biography of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd which describes in harsh detail the free market consequences of pre-Victorian England:
http://www.amazon.com/Dickens-Peter-Ackroyd/dp/0099437090
Besides being relevant to the discussion, it costs only $00.01 on amazon and is a fascinating account of an 18th century White Nationalist. One of its many themes deals with the terrible consequences of laissez faire social policy. But for a moment, let’s ignore even the plight of the poor and talk about freedom of speech and association.
What is legitimate self defense? If degeneracy is destroying our institution of marriage, our will to create families, and our sense of duty, do we have the right to use violence against its propagators? I followed the Austrian school of von Mises, and they are totally free speech. When the Austrians say that a violation of free speech is a violation of the NAP, they are not grossly misrepresenting the NAP. What happens when we remove obscenity laws? How has that been working out for Whites?
Yes, libertarians are for the right to bear arms. But they seem to oppose public education, public media, and censorship. It’s true that since we live under a Weimar government, the weapons of public schools, public media, and censorship are used against us. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t advocate the use of these weapons for ourselves. If we don’t educate the population, and we don’t win the population over, we’ll suffer the decline and defeat of the Eastern Bloc countries. That’s because like socialism, nationalism does not maximize profits.
In reality, the opposite is true. Race mixing is profitable. Racial segregation limits the capitalist’s consumer base. Racial segregation limits the capitalist’s mobility and job opportunity. Capitalists which discriminate on the basis of race are at a competitive disadvantage, and multinational companies want nothing more than to replace organic culture like the Winter Solstice with the mass consumer culture of “the holidays.” The best way to achieve this is through multi-racialism. And of course, messianic Judaism and capitalism are necessarily intertwined due to Jewish proficiency in finance.
Even without messianic Judaism, Capitalism looks forward maybe 50 years, or even 100 years. Capitalism is based on rational actors and the choices of both individuals and firms. It is controlled by economic incentives which act in the present. Success is measured by the size of a retirement fund. As long as the rich can afford to put their children in private schools and gated communities, they don’t care about society as a whole.
Capitalism doesn’t value biological or cultural diversity. It would rather have a globalist culture for the purpose of more easily mass producing “things.” Capitalism is unconcerned with century long trends effecting the environment and our genetic health. Dr. Richard Lynn has a great book on the subject of genetic decline in which he makes the case for a more authoritarian government as the only solution:
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Lynn-Eugenics.pdf
I hope you can understand where I’m coming from when I say that the NAP and libertarianism can’t solve the crux of the threats facing Whites and nations of all races. I’m always glad to hear engagement from the other side of the movement.
“There we have the dynamic of Western economies over the last 40 years”
David Stockman provides some of the historical background for that:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/memo-to-citigroup-ceo-micheal-corbat-does-your-crony-capitalist-plunder-have-no-shame/
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